By Shibani Mahtani and Deepa Seetharaman 

CHICAGO -- The widely shared live video of an assault against a teenager held hostage by four young adults last week shows how far social media has become entwined in the world of violent crime, posing challenges for law enforcement and social media companies alike.

Last week's attack -- in which four young African-Americans allegedly tied, beat up and cut a white mentally impaired teenager while shouting racial insults -- was streamed on Facebook Live in real time. The four, who are all over 18 and being tried as adults, are being held without bail as they await trail.

Those tracking crime in major cities say it is increasingly common for violence to either be streamed on services like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. or provoked by an interaction on social-media platforms, which are central to the identities of many young people, including gang members.

There have been at least 40 such broadcasts of sensitive, violent or criminal footage on live video over the last 12 months, according to a Wall Street Journal tally of events reported by news media.

In late March last year, a Chicago man was unexpectedly shot while live-streaming in front of a convenience store. In April, an Ohio teenager was accused of live-streaming her friend's rape over Twitter's Periscope. Last month, two teenagers died in a car crash in Pennsylvania after the driver fired up Facebook Live.

Facebook says that videos glorifying violence are against its content guidelines, but largely relies on users to flag objectionable content. The company is in the "research stage" of using artificial intelligence to automatically detect violence in live videos.

Twitter and its Periscope app also rely on users to flag graphic, violent content, which the company says isn't allowed on its services unless it is newsworthy. Last year, Periscope started allowing randomly selected users to judge whether comments flagged by others constitute spam or abuse.

Those who track violence say that social media has long been instrumental in provoking and publicizing conflict offline, where insults or a photo posted on Facebook can lead to a shooting. Live video, however, added a dangerous edge to the interactions.

Angalia Bianca, who works with Cure Violence, a nonprofit that works with gang members in several cities to stop violence before it happens, says it is common for a gang to go into a rival gang territory and stream their presence on Facebook Live.

"Sometime they'll bring their guns, sometimes they'll make their gang signs and say things to intimidate rival gang members, all to show that they are not scared," she said. Many of these individuals have public pages, she added, and often tag their rivals to "make sure every single person they have disrespected has seen the post," which can heighten inter-gang tensions and sometimes provoke a violent reaction.

Nearly a third of the more than 500 conflicts that Cure Violence mediated last year in several Chicago neighborhoods were prompted by an interaction online, according to the organization's records.

A spokesman for the Chicago police department said it was tracking this relatively new phenomenon, including when gang members take to social media to boast after a shooting of a rival gang, but didn't actively monitor social media pages to look for conflict that might lead to violence. Even when crimes are being streamed live, the challenge is verifying it is a serious instance of harmful criminal activity rather than teens kidding around, the spokesman added.

Experts say these videos can quickly go viral and are seen by thousands even before the police are alerted to them. The police officer who came across the victim of last week's attack in Chicago was unaware of the Facebook Live video when he approached the victim, police say.

Forrest Stuart, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago who studies how gang members use social media, said the popularity of these videos often spurs young people to keep using them to broadcast criminal or violent activity.

"[Young gang members] are well aware of the voyeuristic desires of people all over and in conversations can recall the number of likes a photo or video gets," Mr. Stuart said. The medium "perpetuates this desire to get public attention, to get recognized [and to get applauded]."

The woman who live streamed her friend's rape in Ohio, 18-year-old Marina Lonina, said in court that she was streaming the incident to keep her friend from being assaulted but "got caught up with all the likes" she was getting, according to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien. The case is pending.

The Chicago incident is "a pretty grim illustration of just what Facebook Live and other products are doing to people," said Mary Anne Franks, law professor at the University of Miami and vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit focused on stopping online abuse. "Part of it was the performance."

Write to Shibani Mahtani at shibani.mahtani@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 12, 2017 08:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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